Categories

Twitter

Experimentation with Juju Part 1

Created on Monday, 02 April 2018 16:46 | Written by Richard Gate | Hits: 411

Juju is described as "An open source application modelling tool. Deploy, configure, scale and operate your software on public and private clouds". I was particularly interested in the "Deploy" capability and that it works over a number of different Cloud Hosting providers. My understanding of Juju so far is that it allows you to define groups of applications to be deployed to dynamically expandable (or contractable) groups of Cloud Hosted Servers within containers. It's own controlling application (the "Controller") is also deployed in the same manner.

My first attempt to start playing was to try and getting Juju running on my MacBook because it looked like that was possible. You can install Juju itself (brew install juju) and you can connect to a remote Juju Controller (juju register) but trying to use the localhost as a Juju Controller proved difficult. Trying to create a localhost (juju bootstrap localhost) resulted in an error saying that lxd (the container system) was not installed, which it wasn't. Trying to get lxd installed on OSX turned into a bit of a deep Rabbit Hole experience. So I tried bootstraping (juju bootstrap aws) an Amazon EC2 instance as the controller. This was remarkably simple after setting setting up API Authentication on the Amazon EC2 console and then adding the credentials to Juju on OSX (juju add-credential aws).

Not wanting to keep an Amazon EC2 instance running while I experimented, I decided to create a VMWare Virtual Machine on OSX to run Ubuntu 16.04 to host the Juju Controller.